Official Secrets

Part of Prayers – in the House of Commons at 1:14 pm on 22 July 1988.

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Photo of Mr Rupert Allason Mr Rupert Allason , Torbay 1:14, 22 July 1988

The injunction was issued by the Attorney-General and the case was dealt with in 1982.

Is the D notice committee really a sensible mechanism for allowing and studying publication? I do not think that it is. The present secretary of the D notice committee is frank about his views. He says that nothing on this subject should ever be written and that, given the opportunity, he would stop all publications of this kind even if they were historical in nature. He is really a glorified photocopier. He receives a manuscript, photocopies it and sends one copy to the relevant department—the security service, the intelligence service or Government communications headquarters, Cheltenham. They then produce comments.

The point is that the department's serving officers look through the manuscripts to decide what should and should not be published or what should be deleted. That is absolutely crazy. For example, I was asked to remove dozens of names from the most recent book that I delivered to the D notice secretary, including names which appear in Kim Philby's book in 1968. In the face of that kind of obstruction, can my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State really claim that the system works well? I do not believe that it does.

Why was my book in 1982 called "A Matter of Trust"? It was so titled because I believed that that was the essence of the relationship between the director-general of the security service and my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister. Even with the Maxwell Fyfe directives, there was no other formal relationship between the two.

A Prime Minister must have confidence in his or her director-general. However, looking back over my experience, what material was deleted from "A Matter of Trust" when it was eventually published? What were the Government so concerned about? The deletions involved examples in which the director-general of the security service had deliberately mislead the Prime Minister of the day. I am not referring to current events or events about which this Government have any reason to be embarrassed. The events date way back to when the director-general of the secretary service deliberately mislead Prime Minister Attlee over whether Klaus Fuchs had already been investigated and whether there had been a recommendation for Fuchs to be subject to an inquiry because of his probable espionage. That was a major mistake. The director-general at the time, Sir Percy Sillitoe, was persuaded, against his better judgment and very reluctantly, to protect his organisation. He was told by three senior members of the security service that if he went to the Prime Minister and told the truth, it would be damaging to the morale of the security service. That happened in 1949, but there have been other cases, including, for example, the Bruno Pontecorvo case and the astonishing Burgess and Maclean White Paper.

I do not want to delve into history. My point is that the Government cannot claim that everything in the garden is rosy. Whatever one's perspective when we look back at these events, the fact is that things have gone very badly wrong. There is no reason to believe that anything has changed.

Very recently the all-party parliamentary war crimes group tried to obtain from the Foreign Office a file which the Foreign Office admits exists on Klaus Barbie. I suggested to the Minister concerned at the Foreign Office that presumably the reluctance to release the file stemmed from the fact that the Foreign Office wanted to ensure that Barbie received a fair trial in France and now that he has been convicted that excuse no longer existed. I was told that because the file, dated 1945–46, contained intelligence information, it might be of use to an enemy and could not be released because there was established precedent. I asked the Minister of State at the time, "Are you aware that the person who was head of the anti-Soviet section within the secret intelligence service in 1945–1946 was Kim Philby, and from whom are we trying to keep that fact secret?" That is the attitude today. More recently, I have tried to obtain access to wartime decrypts of signals that passed between the Japanese naval attaché in Berlin and Tokyo, which are in the Foreign Office's possession, in the Public Record Office. Those same decrypts are available in Tokyo and in the Washington national archives. However, the Foreign Office refuses to allow those files to be available in the Public Record Office and to explain its actions. That is an appalling state of affairs, and it is a direct reflection of Whitehall's attitude to this very sensitive subject.

The Government have not had an easy ride over secrecy. If the House will bear with me, I shall mention a few of the cases we heard about this morning. Some will be familiar to many people and some will not. Since 1979, there has been the Tisdall case; the Ponting case; the Belgrano affair, which was intelligence orientated; the Cathy Massiter case; telephone tapping scandals; the "Spycatcher" fiasco; the BBC programme "My Country, Right or Wrong"; the conviction of Michael Bettaney; the injunction on Anthony Cavendish; the GCHQ union saga; the GCHQ scandal of leakages in Hong Kong; the Zircon satellite affair; the Cyprus signals case; the Rothschild statement; and Geoffrey Prime.

My reason for mentioning them all is to demonstrate that they are not passing issues or banana skins that are special to this Government. They are banana skins that will blight all Governments of all complexions in the future. It is an occupational hazard that there will be leakages of information and security cock-ups, and it is important that we should get these matters right.

I revert to 1979, and to a case that I did not mention but which was probably the most significant—that of Anthony Blunt. It was significant because, as was previously stated, the Prime Minister, to her credit, was very frank about the security service's role and made a candid statement. She was more frank than any previous Prime Minister on the subject. That was in 1979. It is not so much that we should commend her for her frankness, but that we should examine what was the advice of the security service in 1979. I can tell the House what it was.

Sir John Jones, who was then director-general of the security service, said, "You must not expose Sir Anthony Blunt. He must be protected at all costs, because if he is publicly exposed as a spy, we shall all be in trouble. It will mean that we shall never be able to offer credible immunity from prosecution to others of his ilk." The Prime Minister considered that advice, and I imagine that because she is a barrister, she considered also that she might have had to stand by and watch Sir Anthony Blunt perjure himself, as he was going to do by bringing an action for defamation against an author. The Prime Minister decided, rightly in my view, that the security service's advice was wrong and that here was an opportunity for her to be frank. That is exactly what happened.

Alas, circumstances have changed since 1979. How are hon. Members ever to be educated about and to acquaint themselves with the conduct of the security service and related matters unless they are instructed in broad terms, on matters of principle, by people who have experience of them? My hon. Friend the Member for Thanet, South (Mr. Aitken) mentioned the case of John Day, who was injuncted when he wished to discuss not operational details or matters relating to his work in the security service that were definitely secret but broad principles of accountability. That was banned, and would have been banned under the measures proposed in the White Paper it would also have been banned. He might even be serving the first year of a two-year prison sentence by now. Michael McCaul is another former member of the security service, someone with wide experience whom the nation trusted to work in a most sensitive area for more than 30 years. If he cannot be trusted to come to the House and brief Back Benchers on the principles of accountability and the problems of supervision, on whom are we to rely?

According to my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster, North (Mr. Wheeler), we are supposed to rely on the present system of accountability, which involves the Secretary of State coming to the House and answering questions. That sounds splendid; the trouble is that it does not happen. When my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills asked a relevant question, he was denied the information that he sought because, by convention, the Secretary of State does not answer questions on this sensitive issue. I do not consider that that is accountability.

I am focusing my remarks particularly on the paragraph relating to the duties of confidentiality of members of the security service. It is important to get this right in the legislation, because it will not go away. During the appeal that was heard in the other place, counsel for the plaintiff—-the Government—said that he knew of 10 books that were to be written or had already been embarked upon by former members of the security and intelligence services, some of them recently retired. He was classically misinformed. By my reckoning the number is nearer 15 or 16, and I hope that the Government are rather better informed than I am.

Those proposing to write such books include John Day, Nicholas Elliott, Jock Kane—who has been injuncted—Anthony Cavendish—who has been injuncted but has a contract to write a biography of Maurice Oldfield—the Seymours, the late Jack Morton—whose diaries are to be published—Dick White and Desmond Bristow, who is in Madrid and, like Peter Wright, is out of jurisdiction, as the law that we are discussing will not remotely affect people abroad. Fred Winterbottom is embarking on his fourth volume. Leo Marks has already run into some trouble. Anthony Simpkins has been authorised by the Government, but the historical section of the Cabinet Office has got cold feet and the book does not seem likely to be published in the near future. David Smiley has announced his intention of writing a book. George Blake has published one in the Soviet Union, and another is due out shortly. Even Greville Wynne, God bless him, is writing yet another book from Majorca.

It is all very well to say that there is a mechanism for such people to write their memoirs. There is a mechanism, but it has never worked, it is not working now and there is not the slightest chance of its working in the future. There are possibilities of finding one that would work. Could we, for example, use the Security Commission? Somehow I doubt it. It may have lost a bit of credibility following its recent reports, and no one took any notice of its strong recommendation some years ago for the introduction of polygraphs.

One wonders, too, whether people living abroad will have a duty to submit their manuscripts to the authorities in this country. We know of many cases where they have not bothered. We know also that when they have tried—as did Gordon Welchman, who wrote about his wartime experiences at Bletchley park—they have been threatened with prosecution if ever they returned to this country. GCHQ was so vindictive towards that man that he became an American citizen. He was literally hounded to his death by GCHQ in America. That is no exaggeration. His only job was with the Mitre Corporation in the United States. On GCHQ's recommendation his security clearance was withdrawn. Because he could not work and because he tried to fight that ban in America, he eventually succumbed to a coronary. We do not want that to happen again. We must not create a leper colony.

I am all in favour of confidentiality and of secrets being kept, but I believe that these individuals can be trusted to give us the benefit of their experience without jeopardising national security every time they write or say anything on the subject. We heard about what happened in Australia: the director of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation wrote a book that has been cleared. We heard about the Comte de Marenche in France. There is scarcely a CIA officer in the United States who has not written a book. There are 14,000 volumes on espionage in the CIA library. A considerable number of those volumes were written by members of the CIA who used the publication review board as an effective mechanism for getting clearance and avoiding the problem of jeopardising national security.

I have long advocated not parliamentary control over the supervision of the security service but the introduction of non-executive directors who would have the confidence of the House. They would be inside my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State's wall of secrecy. They would be able to supervise and provide a safety valve for members of the Security Service, who would, be able to go to the directors and explain in confidence that they believed that there had been some kind of an inequity. Sir Philip Woodfield has been appointed as staff counsellor, not just for the security service but for the Secret Intelligence Service and for GCHQ. Those latter organisations do not really need a staff counsellor, but the security service needs one. He must not, however, be stuck in the Cabinet Office. It would be impossible for him to work efficiently inside the Cabinet Office. Nine buildings in London are used by the security service. Security service officers who are unhappy about their duties have to ring the Cabinet Office to make an appointment to see Sir Philip. That is not the best system. He ought to have an office inside central security service headquarters so that people could slip in to see him and explain their grievances.

I thank my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Brittan) for suggesting that we should look again at this matter. The 1911 Act, which was supposed to have been a temporary law, has been with us for 77 years. It was passed by a Liberal Administration. Now is our opportunity to make sure that we get it right for future generations. It is vital that a law that will be on the statute book for many years should be the best that we can devise. I urge my right. hon. Friend the Secretary of State to look again at the possibility of establishing a mechanism whereby members of the so-called leper colony will have an opportunity to publish.